Dynamics Portals – Entity List – Integration using OData feed
With Dynamics Portal’s Entity list ‘OData Feed’ option, we can expose the data in the form OData API, which can be further consumed by external applications.
Lets take a scenario,
- You have a public facing Dynamics Portal where people gets registered, which get stored as ‘Contacts’ in Dynamics CE instance.
- You need to share all the ‘Active Contacts’ to your back end team which uses an Excel sheet to manage data.
It can be achieved by enabling OData feed on Entity List by following below steps:
- Open your Entity List and go tot ‘OData Feed’ section. (Refer my previous articles on how to create an Entity List)
- Enable the ‘OData Feed’ option along with below details
- Entity Type Name : Your Dynamics entity schema name
- Entity Set Name : Can be anything but as a best practice provide plural name of your Dynamics entity.
- View : Select the view. The structure of your OData feed would be determined based on the view you pick.
- Once the ‘OData Feed’ enabled, you can get all the oData feeds enabled on Portals by forming URL -> {Your Portal URL}+”/_odata“
- Now access the ‘Contacts’ oData feed by forming URL -> {Your Portal URL}+”/_odata“+Entity Set Name (i.e., contacts)
How to consume the oData API in Excel:
- Copy the OData set URL
- In the new Excel sheet, go to Data -> Get Data -> From Other Sources -> From OData Feed
- Paste the OData URL and click ‘OK’
- Click ‘Load’ to load the data to excel sheet.
- If you want to Transform data like replace ‘Null’, click on ‘Transform Data’
- Your excel sheet shall looks as below once the data loads.
Note:
- The OData API URL is accessible anonymously with no authentication prompted.
🙂
Dynamics Portals – Entity List ‘Map View’
Dynamics Portal’s Entity List has an option to pin the records on a Map based on the Address of those records.
How does ‘Map View’ looks on Portal:
- With ‘Map View’ enabled, you will get a Map (bing/google) and matching records will be pinned on the map (i.e., Refer 1 pinned on the Map below).
How to set up ‘Map View’:
- On the ‘Entity List’ form, check the ‘Map Enabled’ checkbox.
- In ‘Entity Field Mappings’, map the address fields from ‘Contact’ entity (As my entity list mapped to Contact).
- Under ‘Settings’ section, provide below details
- Map Type : Bing/Google (I chose ‘Bing’ for this article)
- Credentials : Bing API credentials (You need to login here with your Live/Outlook account and generate the Key)
- Default Center Latitude : This is important. Geo coordinates where you want your map start from (I took ‘New Jersey’ coordinates as Default)
- Default Center Longitude : This is important. Geo coordinates where you want your map start from (I took ‘New Jersey’ coordinates as Default)
- Save
- On Portal, you will notice a Map loaded with ‘Default Center Latitude’ and ‘Default Center Longitude’ (i.e., ‘New Jersey’ in this example).
- In the ‘Address’ search box, provide ‘New York’ and click ‘Search’.
- As I configured Contact ‘Rajeev Pentyala’ with ‘New York’ coordinates (Refer screen below), Contact showed up in above screen.
- You can click on ‘Get Directions’ to get directions between Searched city (i.e., ‘New York’) and Default coordinates (i.e., New Jersey).
🙂
Dynamics Portals – Entity List Filters
Dynamics Portals Entity List is a easy and seamless way to port Dynamics 365 CE entity views to Dynamics Portals.
As an example, if I port ‘Active Contacts’ and ‘Inactive Contacts’ views to Portals, Portal User would start see all the Contacts based on his Web Roles.
Now lets implement a filter condition, to show only those Contacts where the logged in ‘Portal User’ (i.e., Contact) Company belongs to.
With out Filter Condition:
- I logged in to Portal as ‘Rajeev Pentyala’ whose Company is ‘Northwind Traders’ and having ‘Adminstrator’ Web Role.
- I can see all the Contacts irrespective of ‘Company’
With Filter Condition:
- With Filter Condition in place, I will see only those Contacts from my Company ‘Northwind Traders’
- To configure ‘Filter Condition’
- Open ‘Entity List’ form
- Under ‘Filter Conditions’ section, select ‘Account Attribute’ as ‘Company Name(parentcustomerid)’
- Open ‘Entity List’ form
Metadata Filter:
- What if we have to provide option to the ‘Portal User’ to filter the records based on field values?
- In below screen, Portal User has an option to filter records based on 2 Company Names (i.e., Northwind Traders, Adventure Works)
- This behavior can be achieved using ‘Metadata Filter’ option.
- In this article, I am going with ‘FetchXML Filter’ option, to provide filter options based on ‘Company Names’.
- Open ‘Advanced Find’ and prepare the filter.
- Download Fetchxml and copy only the <filter> tag
- Note: Add ‘adx:uiname’ property in <filter> tag to customize the filter label in Portal.
- Paste it in ‘FetchXML’ field and Save
- Notes:
- You can define more than one ‘Metadata Filters’.
- Refer article for detailed usage of Filters.
🙂
Dynamics Portals – Portal Checker
‘Portal Checker’ has been added as part of Portal capabilities version 9.1.1 for Dynamics 365 CE apps.
Portal checker for Dynamics 365 for CE Portal is a self-service diagnostic tool that can be used by Portal administrators to identify common issues in their portal.
- Connect to Dynamics 365 Administration Center
- In the Portal administration screen, click on ‘Diagnose and resolve problems’
Portal checker helps to identify issues with your portal by looking at various configuration parameters and provides suggestions on how to fix them.
Refer this article for more details
🙂
Dynamics Portal – Configurations packaging and migrating to different instances
In Dynamics CE, to move Customizations and Configurations from one instance to another, we rely on Solutions.
How about migrating Dynamics Portal configurations from one instance to other?
- As we know, Dynamics Portal development involves several configurations and Customizations to achieve a desired experience for portal end users.
- To migrate Portal configurations from the source Dynamics CE instance, and then importing it into the target Dynamics CE instance, you would need to use the Configuration Migration tool and a portal-specific configuration schema file.
- Schema files are available for the following portal types:
Refer this article for detailed explanation.
🙂
Dynamics Portals – Entity List not rendering on Web Page
Other day I faced a strange issue in my Portals, where my Entity list NOT rendering on the Web Page. The story goes as below.
- I have an Entity List ‘Contact’ with 2 views configured.
- Created a ‘Web Page’ and set the ‘Entity List’ to ‘Contacts’ and ‘Published State’ set to ‘Published’
- Go to Portal and refresh the Web Page but there is no trace of ‘Entity List’
- Initially I suspected Cache Issue, hence I reopened and cleared the Cache but still no luck.
Fix:
- Portal’s ‘Content Editor’ came to my rescue.
- On the Portal, navigate to the ‘Web Form’ and click on ‘Edit’ from ‘Content Editor’ menu.
- In the ‘Edit Contact List’ screen, set the ‘Entity List’ to the ‘Contacts’ entity list and Save.
- That’s solved the issue and I could see the ‘Contacts’ entity list rendered on the ‘Web Page’
Note:
- I don’t have reason or explanation what caused this behavior. Alternately you can try Restart the portal if you have O365 ‘Admin Center’ access.
🙂
Dynamics Portals – Entity List – Configure custom view names
With the Dynamics Portals ‘Entity List’, its easy and seamless to port the Dynamics entity views to Portal.
In below screen, I configured ‘Active Contacts’ and ‘Inactive Contacts’ views in my Entity List and if you notice, the view names are defaulted to Dynamics view names (i.e.,Active Contacts, Inactive Contacts)
What if we have to show custom labels for views in portal? its simple
- Open ‘Entity List’ form from your Dynamics application
- Views -> Advance settings
- Set your desired text in ‘Display Name’ field
- Save
- Go to Portal and refresh the Entity list web page
🙂
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